


When Your Phone's Held Hostage

by ashdeanmanns



Series: Stucky One-Shots and Shorts [4]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Bisexual Steve Rogers, First Dates, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Gay Bucky Barnes, High School, Homecoming, M/M, Milkshakes, One Shot, POV Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Short One Shot, Study Date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:28:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23886712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashdeanmanns/pseuds/ashdeanmanns
Summary: Escaping the blaring music inside, he opted to relax in the courtyard. He laid on one of the glossy benches, his head settled in the curve of Natasha's stomach and thigh, staring up at the speckle of white stars against the black sky, the yellow light of the lamp post hovering in his peripheral vision. Light laughter met his ears, as well as the faint music from inside what was a cafeteria by day."Hi?"-Steve gets stood up at his sophomore homecoming. It's Natasha's fault, really. She was the one that bought his ticket, made him attend with a tie around his neck.Bucky's phone gets taken hostage by his friends, and they make him do something he wouldn't do otherwise.Maybe homecoming wasn't as bad as Steve thought.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Stucky One-Shots and Shorts [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1732867
Comments: 5
Kudos: 108





	When Your Phone's Held Hostage

**Author's Note:**

> That summary is honest to god horrible. And there's nothing I can tag.
> 
> This is -by far- not a masterpiece. More of a writing exercise(?) to get the word vomit out before I continue In All Our Years. Gotta get my inner poet up and running.

Steve got stood up. _Of_ _course_ _he did._

Why would Peggy Carter want anything to do with him? He was stick-thin to her voluptuous figure, pale to her perfect, creamy tan. He wasn't funny, he couldn't dance to save his life - his grandmother had tried when he was in sixth grade and Natasha Romanoff had asked him to be her friend-date to the middle school dance, but those lessons had ended _horribly_ \- and he was an underclassman in her eyes. A sophomore that hadn't hit that eighth grade growth spurt, though his voice had plummeted miles over the edge of the puberty cliff. His hands and feet were too big for his weak limbs, his height was on the shorter side of five foot and a half, and he just...he felt like a speck of dirt compared to Peggy Carter's healthy rose.

Even if he was just a stand-in.

Escaping the blaring music inside, he opted to relax in the courtyard. He laid on one of the glossy benches, his head settled in the curve of Natasha's stomach and thigh, staring up at the speckle of white stars against the black sky, the yellow light of the lamp post hovering in his peripheral vision. Light laughter met his ears, as well as the faint music from inside what was a cafeteria by day.

"Hi?"

The new voice startled him into a sitting position, his forehead hitting Nat's jaw. She spit out a curse, cradling the bone. Steve swung his feet off the bench and turned around to look at her, eyes wide.

"I'm so sorry - are you okay?" the voice exclaimed, gentle and caring. Steve knew that voice from one of his classes.

Nat waved then off. "I'm fine," she dismissed, only slightly strained. "I promise. I'm great. Initial shock."

Steve turned back around. Bucky Barnes stood between him and the lamp post, hands clasped anxiously in front of him. His purple dress shirt was tucked into a nice pair of jeans and had a couple buttons undone at the collar, his sleeves were pushed up past his elbows. His dark hair was a mess of curls and fluff (like always, unless he was running late and had to skip that morning's shower), sticking up from his hands running through it, the very edges of the strands haloed in a ring of white by the gold light behind him.

Bucky was a junior, and Steve knew that because they were seated beside each other in Spanish II - and had no reason to be in that class other than the fact that they had to have two years of one language to graduate (not technically, but it was strongly encouraged by many colleges, so it might as well have been required.) They'd been in school for mayby two months, and Bucky was definitely one of the best parts of Steve's day - even though it was second period, before ten AM. His laughter was infectious, he never failed to make him smile, he offered Steve his orange and purple Letterman jacket when he couldn't stop shivering because their teacher refused to move him away from the large plug-in fans (and if Steve "forgot his jacket in his locker," then that was _not_ his fault.)

They were friends. School friends, certainly. Steve had watched Bucky down a supersized mug of coffee from the Speedway across the street mixed with Redbull because he got no sleep the night before ( _"because my brother's the devil, Steve,_ _I_ _swear!"_ ); Bucky had raced to the nurses office after she hadn't answered to three buzzes from the emergency button and Steve had collapsed with a horrible asthma attack from the heat (their school didn't have air conditioning, it was built in the thirties or the forties - whatever, no one could remember - before air conditioning existed. No one made fun of anyone for sweating their entire body weight, because _everyone_ was sweating in the first and last couple months of the school year.) Bucky brought boxes of fried chicken from his job at Lee's Famous Recipe, Señora gave all her students permission to eat in her room (she even had a microwave and a coffee maker), so they ate cold fried chicken at least three times a month. They walk out of Spanish together, splitting apart when Steve had to go to his English room and Bucky would continue on to the library for his study hall.

They were past being just school friends. Steve had gone to Bucky's house on a Saturday to help him study the vocab, but he'd been ambushed immediately after walking in the door. A girl from his own grade - Rebecca Barnes, she was adorable and they had choir together for all three years of middle school - and a girl he would later learn was a sixth grader, ushering him and his backpack to the living room where Bucky - in his Toy Story pajama pants and a wife beater - was buried under stuffed animals and a five-year old boy. Steve had gladly taken a break from schoolwork and watched Disney and DreamWorks movies from the late 2000s with the four Barnes siblings (movies of his _childhood_ , that he would always love. But he knew for sure that Bucky loved How To Train Your Dragon more than he did.) After that, Steve told Bucky that he was an only child and his mom worked weekends, and Bucky had said, "Yeah, cool, if we actually have to study, we'll do it at your place," and he winked.

Steve had never felt so inferior.

They were past being friends just at school. But Steve wasn't sure if they were every-day friends. A guy like Bucky wasn't going to be close with a guy like Steve. And he doesn't mean that in a stereotypical way. But he knows Bucky has his wrestling teammates, his friend group that first formed back in kindergarten.

Where did one little guy fit into that?

Nowhere.

Awkwardly, Steve responded, "Hey." And that was it. All he had to say.

Hey.

Yeah, that worked. Maybe. Not really.

Bucky glanced over his shoulder before meeting Steve's eyes. "I was just - I was wondering - fuck." With a new resolve, he quickly asked with a thumb pointed over his shoulder, "They're about to play slow shit. You wanna dance?"

Steve's insides twisted. Bucky wanted to dance with him? With a skinny little twig, of all people? But the idea of it had butterflies twirling in his stomach, a good type of nausea that would eventually lead to the bad type.

Instead of answering with a nervous, overwhelmed stammer like he definitely normally would have, Steve faked some sort of confidence? Whatever. He had no clue what he was doing, he didn't have to put a name to anything. He asked, sarcastically, "You want to brave the grind pit?"

He scoffed, huffing out a soft laugh. "I got pulled into it earlier, I barely made it out with my life. Nah. Just, away from the crowd. Whatever you want."

Natasha poked at his spine, and Steve spun around to swat at her. She smacked him back, and shoved him up off the bench and into Bucky's chest. His strong hands instinctively grabbed at his waist to steady him, and Steve's heart practically exploded in his chest, like they did in the cartoons. He looked up at Bucky with wide eyes, and he immediately let him go and stepped away.

"Yeah," he squeaked. His face turned an even darker shade of red, and he cleared his throat before going on. "Yeah. We can do that."

A grin split out on Bucky's face. "Awesome. Come on." He grabbed Steve's hand and pulled him along. Steve scrambled ahead a few steps to be in step with the junior, and they walked side-by-side through the two sets of double doors that let into the back gymnasium hall, which branched off from the cafeteria and led to the upperclassmen wing.

"Did you come here with anyone?" Steve asked as they rounded the corner into the cafeteria, only having to raise his voice a little since they were the farthest away from the speakers, that were clear on the other side of the room. But as they walked deeper in, the louder they would have to speak.

Bucky stopped barely twenty feet into the cafeteria (about a quarter of the way through), pulling him into one of the triangle cut-outs in the wall. Above them loomed the Class Boards, each one with a different themed painting for each graduating class, and the signatures of all the students. Their corner was 2008 and 2009. He answered, "No, just with the guys. I thought you weren't coming?"

"Nat - the girl outside - told me on Tuesday that I had to come. She bought my ticket and made me spend the night." He didn't mention Peggy, not wanting to cover that. It didn't matter. It wasn't like they were involved or anything. It had been a last minute thing. She had planned to come with her boyfriend/not boyfriend Daniel, but he had to cancel. She asked Steve if he would accompany her.

Obviously, she changed her mind about wanting to go.

Bucky chuckled at hearing Nat's antics, and raked his fingers through his hair to push it back away from his forehead. No matter, because a wayward curl flopped back over to hang over his temple. "Yeah, Dum Dum did that to me my freshman year. Told me I had to have the 'high school experience.'" He emphasized the phrase with finger quotation marks, which made Steve giggle.

Fuck. He giggled.

He was in deep.

He had heard a lot about Tim Dugan in the time he and Bucky had known each other - from dumb shit he did at random present times, to dumb shit he'd done in the past that Bucky _just had_ to tell Steve about when he remembered it.

The popular rap music (that was definitely not rap, it was mumbling and it wasn't good) Steve couldn't stand thankfully came to an end. After a few moments of silence, a song that had once been played religiously on the local radio stations started up, and Bucky raised his eyebrows in question. Steve stepped into his space, but didn't know where to put his hands. "I can't dance," he confessed.

His friend just laughed. "Okay. Slow dancing is easy. You just..." He guided Steve's hands up to his shoulders, and then slid his arms around his waist. "And then you kind of just sway?"

Steve glared. "You don't know how to do this, either!"

"I do!" he exclaimed, exasperated. "My cousin's wedding."

He frowned. "Your cousin's wedding was in a forest, Buck. It was weird and ritualistic, you were scared for your life, and your name was spelled J-A-H-M-E-Z one your place card."

"Shit, I told you that, didn't I? Okay, I kind of only know how to do this from the final scenes in those awful Disney Channel movies - you know, Geek Charming -" Steve snorted, ducking his head, "- and Radio Rebel."

Bucky pinched Steve's side, and Steve raised his head and slapped one of his shoulders in retaliation. "That's how it is?"

"Oh, that's how it is." Bucky smiled, and pulled him in closer.

By the second slow song, the two boys finally seemed to settle into a rhythm, and had gravitated closer during that first song. Steve groaned when he recognized the new one, and set his forehead against Bucky's chest as if to hide from it.

"What's up?"

He raised his head again, looking up at Bucky's worried expression. "They're seriously playing 'Perfect' by Ed Sheeran." He shook his head. "This is why I don't go to stuff like this. I feel like I'm a background character in a coming-of-age movie."

Bucky laughed, and tugged him even closer. He craned his head down to set his forehead against Steve's. "To be fair, this whole thing is cliche."

"Your whole face is cliche," he grumbled, but didn't dare move. Despite the proximity, Steve couldn't make out the color of Bucky's irises - which he knew were a vibrant steel blue - because of their dark surroundings.

"You're horrible, Steve."

"I know."

"You wanna know the truth?" Steve stayed silent, looking up at him with a question in his eyes, waiting for him to go on. "My friends made me ask you to do this, because they knew I wouldn't have done it otherwise. They have my phone hostage and are threatening to call my mom and make it sound like an orgy."

Steve couldn't help but lean back in Bucky's arms and laugh, pulling himself out of that trance. "Oh, my god."

He sighed. "Yeah, yeah, laugh it up."

When he managed to calm himself down, Steve asked, "Why wouldn't you do it otherwise?"

He pushed the words out in one quick breath, "Because I really like you and I wanted to ask you out." He shrugged, almost helplessly. "Steve, you're really cute and I say dumb shit around you because your fucking smile is the best thing I've ever seen."

He cocked his head to the side. "When?"

Bucky's brows shot straight up his forehead. "'When'?" he echoed, taken aback by the answer.

Steve nodded. "Keep in mind, I'm not available on any day that ends with 'Y.'"

He pinched his side again, and Steve giggled as he shied away. Bucky rolled his eyes and responded, seriously, hands light on Steve's waist, "If your mom's okay with it - Dugan wanted to go raid some fast food place once this was over. But I can abandon them and we can go to the Steak n' Shake across the street. My treat."

Steve smiled, and glanced around them. "What if we go now?"

"Now?"

"Yeah, now. Come on." He ran his hands down Bucky's arms and took one of his hands. They started toward the back gymnasium hallway, when a wolf whistle caught their attention.

"Aye, Barnes!" Bucky's Letterman was launched at them by who must have been one of his friends. He let go of Steve's hand and caught it, and saluted with the other before turning back to him. The brunet nodded toward the door, and Steve walked beside him as he shrugged on the jacket, taking his phone out of one of the pockets to slide it into his form-fitting jeans. Right before they walked through the exit, Bucky's warm hand found his own.


End file.
